Stina Nordenstam doesn't play live. Instead she has commissioned a series of shorts to complement the songs on her new album, This Is Stina Nordenstam, and they tour the independent cinema circuit on her behalf. There are no fry-ups at the Blue Boar for her studio band, which includes keyboard player/producer Mitchell Froome and Attractions drummer Pete Thomas. This is an arthouse twist on pop's traditional movie ambitions - not so much cinema performance as eclectic video compilation; a bit like Onedotzero, with added cutting-edge vomiting.
The sequence begins with the Bowie-ish Keen Yellow Planet, accompanied by sub-Futurama animation, and soon improves with a painterly, costumed tryst and a bizarre sequence featuring a trapped, dancing man, his bald head stuck through a partition wall.
Another takes the notion of contest between sound and image to further extremes: a grainy black and white sequence of a schoolgirl arriving home to find her mother unconscious among signs of debauchery, the TV displaying static. The tension rises as the girl climbs the stairs to find... oh no! But by now we have stopped listening to the song because we are gripped by the story. The film-makers, perhaps realising this, loosen their narrative grip, and the film ends in ambiguity, repetition - it's just a video again.
It's a while before Nordenstam finally makes an appearance, singing shyly while a fantastical circus story unfolds. In the next track she walks unharmed through rush-hour traffic to meet her lover. Trainsurfing, shot in silvery monochrome, shows more beautiful people drifting through the urban pastoral like the models in a Diesel ad. Intriguing fillers, shot over remixed audio fragments, connect the tracks.
The concluding song, The Diver, is both a high and low point, a beautifully shot and edited sequence featuring a nervous ballerina who throws up while performing before stern male examiners. Off screen, Nordenstam sings, "Don't look down," in that familiar fragile tone, while the painful scrape of the dancer's pointes against the studio floor are dubbed in equally claustrophobic detail.
